So the Denver Post writes a story that misses the point on address verification by a good mile or six. The story focuses on the somewhat tangential issue of “untraceable credit cards” and the larger issue — that the Obama, Murtha, and Udall campaigns have turned off address verification software that would prevent fake names and addresses.

Okay, so the media misses the mark. Big deal, right? But being my happy and well-mannered self, I had to point out the reporter in question that he’d missed the real story.

The response has to be read to be believed:

I believe your facts are a little off, but it’d make a better story if you were correct. I don’t do journalism that way, or with the invective you prefer, so I’m afraid I’m obtuse, if that’s your definition..

I don’t know who “Good Will” is, or care.

Let’s go over that in slow motion. The political reporter from the Denver Post has just told you that he does not care that the probable next President has mysterious anonymous donors. He does not care that the Obama campaign has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in a suspect fashion and he does not care who is really behind his campaign.

KMBZ in the Kansas City area makes a big deal out of being “conservative talk.” That said, try getting them to notice the Obama Address Verification scandal. I just got off the phone with the call screener who said, “I can’t put you on the air to talk about this becuase I can’t find a reputable news account that verifies what you’re saying.”

So, let’s review. If the New York Times and Washington Post don’t say it’s a problem, then it’s not a problem, no matter how many people raise their hands to say it is. Trying to explain to a call screener that the reason this is an important story is precisely because the national media isn’t carrying it is like trying to explain to a dog what a color tv looks like.

Well, I could have spent the day working. But where’s the entertainment factor in that?

So instead, I spent the day sending out emails to various newspaper editors across the country. The email read:

Will your paper cover the story of how Obama, Murtha, and other Democratic Party candidates have turned off Address Verification on their websites? It’s been well established now that people can make contributions to these campaigns using phoney names and addresses that don’t match the billing addresses and account names for the credit cards being used.

These verification systems are a normal part of doing business on the net. Not having them means that they got turned off as a decision.

Enabling anonymous and/or disguised contributions, helping people evade campaign contribution limits, seems like a rather important story. Do you plan on covering this story? Or is the fix really in?

Not surprisingly, I received little response, except from one Virginia paper — and yes, I was targeting swing states, thanks — who wrote:

We’ll look for such a story from our various wire services. Thanks.

Well. There’s no message there, right. There’s no way anyone could read that as anything other than “SIT DOWN AND GO BACK TO WORK, YOU MORON!”.

So I wrote back:

So if a news story is lying there on the ground for you, but AP or Reuters don’t carry it, it doesn’t exist? That’s too bad. I remember reading about Woodward and Bernstein and imagining that journalists pursued stories.

Here’s the brave new world response I got:

The press corps covering the national election is vast, including many independent online watchdogs. Our wire services are broad. If the Obama campaign is encouraging or enabling contributors to skirt campaign finance limits, it will out.

We don’t assign local staff to the national campaign, with the exception of local appearances and other stories of special local relevance.

So let’s reiterate: the AP and Reuters will protect us. If Obama has a campaign finance secret, the wire services, who of course have no rooting interest whatsoever, will find out. And it’s not the place of a little regional paper and presumably, much less a reader’s) to do otherwise.

Remind me again why newspapers are supposed to be better than bloggers?

As mentioned previously, the Obama campaign is telling America a puzzling story when they say they don’t know the identities of people giving money via credit card. After all, the software I’ve used will tell you the names as soon as you issue a rebate.

Internet credit card transaction obviously have a high potential for fraud. So in every case I’ve seen, if you submit a mailing address that doesn’t match the billing address of the card in question, the transaction will kick out and fail to complete.

Why isn’t this true of the Obama campaign? This would require someone to go in and change the script to allow pseudonyms and false addresses.

On the surface it’s an absolutely unremarkable story: a retiring state politician has a coffee at the house of a supporter to introduce and endorse her successor. Something like this happens every election cycle somewhere in the United States.

Now, that last part is the really interesting part. If it was just a garden variety local politics fundraiser, the hosts might say “yeah, we raised a few hundred bucks”. But when you read the Politico story, what’s impressive is the party discipline being shown: the wall of silence is down.

At the official campaign website, the Obama campaign decries “guilt by association”. However, that’s not the point. The point is that there was an objective verifiable association, and that no one involved is talking about the association.

Dr. Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and if you guessed from that one piece of information that his scholarship is of the “Arabs good, Jews and Europeans bad” tradition, you wouldn’t be wrong. Dr. Khalidi isn’t just any ordinary professor in academia, however — he’s the former spokesman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, having spent 1976 to 1982 as the one of the directors of the PLO’s news agency, WAFA.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”

So that sounds like a pretty well-established friendship. Many talks, meals shared around the dinner table, a testimonial at a farewell dinner — wouldn’t you say that sounds like a good friend?

Barack Obama seems at pains to say exactly the opposite. From his own campaign’s site, Obama is quoted as saying:

To pluck out one person who I know and who I’ve had a conversation with (nb: emphasis added)… is a very problematic stand to take.